Sydney Padua wrote and drew the graphic novel / graphic documentary book The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (see also here).
I hope these types of wonderful books will never be replaced by ebooks. Sydney Padua wrote a beautiful graphical novel or documentary (it’s actually a new type of book) about Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace Byron, the world’s first inventor respectively programmer of the computer.
Padua is an illustrator and documentalist, and has created a piece of art with this comic style documentary.
The stories in the book come in a rough lively graphical style, and are followed by detailed scientific/comical style notes, even by notes to the notes.
Ada Lovelace (née Byron), daughter of the ‘mad poet’ Byron, was forbidden to be
involved with poetry in her youth, to prevent being influenced by the same dangerous poetic infection her father suffered from. Instead she was raised by a mathematics teacher, De Morgan.
Lovelace and Babbage, working together during Ada’s life (she died young of cancer), were the first to recognize
that such a calculating machine might be generalized into a general computer, which might be used for other application than just calculating numbers.
Babbage is the typical socially inapt scientist, is massively stubborn and has no problem shouting at government officials, including pre minister Peel. Strangely he had very few rows with Ada, and notably one when Lady Lovelace refused to include unpleasant remarks from Babbage aimed at the British government about the way they treat his Difference Engine.
In a way they are the opposite of the other founding father of today’s computer, Alan Turing. Where Lovelace and especially Babbage spent a lot of their time on the engineering challenges of building their computer (and Padua in the appendix elaborates on these challenges) Alan Turing totally disregarded the engineering intricacies of building a computer and created a completely abstract ‘platonic’ computer.
Nevertheless both computer scientists avant la lettre had an intricate relationship with the high society of these days. We mentioned government contacts like pre minister Robert Peel, but the list is much longer and includes Mary Evans aka George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Michael Faraday, and even Queen Victoria.
Padua subtly describes how Ada Lovelace could not escape the spell of her father’s inheritance; she suffers from a bipolar disorder, uses drugs (opium and cannabis) and gambling.
Babbage and Lovelace’s interest are very broad and oftentimes far ahead of their time. They include research into a Universal Language, thoughts about an Automatic Novelist generating books, coding and cryptography theory (see also The Information), mathematics and poetry, 4 dimensional space, imaginary numbers, …
In the Appendix Padua elaborates on the complexity of the Analytical Engine that Babbage and Lovelace had in mind, and especially the mechanical challenges of building such a machine. It simply was not possible. They were too far ahead of their time in their thinking, especially in relation to the state of engineering at that time. It would take a century before their ideas could be realized, and then only by applying the newly developed technology of electronics.
Thus, the Analytical Engine was never built, the programs from Ada were never executed, and in that respect Lovelace and Babbage remain strange footnotes in science history, but definitely very interesting ones.
Connectivity and serendipity are key factors in the generation of ideas. Steven Johnson wrote Where Good Ideas Come From and gives us advise how to create your own idea-generating ecosystem.
The community of ideas Johnson uses natural selection as a metaphor for how successful ideas and innovations occur. He also describes the surprising finding that, according to studies, innovation increases where men live in larger communities.
“A metropolis fifty times bigger than a town is 130 times more innovative.”
And goes into the analysis of how this happens.
“Something about the environment of a big city was making its residents significantly more innovative than residents of smaller towns. But what was it?”
Johnson´s main premise is that ideas are most fruitfully created and enriched not in isolation but in connections with other ideas, where ideas reinforce and generate new ideas.
“If there is a single maxim that runs through this book’s arguments, it is that we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them. … “A good idea is a network.”
We find a similar notion in Hwang and Horowitt’s The Rainforest (see also the article here). Hwang says that a social context is key to innovation today. It’s not just about creating the brainpower but also the entrepreneurial context to turn this brainpower into something marketable. The trick is to create a social environment where cross-fertilization takes place.
Where Hwang talks about a soup of entrepreneurial elements, for Steven Johnson, a “flow” should be created, igniting an entrepreneurial life form in a soup of creative ideas to turn into an idea machine, where new ideas flourish and new ideas are created from other ideas.
The next thing possible The state of technology, concepts, and societal state leads to the concept of “the next thing possible.” Developments move forward in small steps and concepts until a final drop pushes the water over the edge and a flow of water—or, maybe better, soup—is released.
“The scientist Stuart Kauffman has a suggestive name for the set of all those first-order combinations: “the adjacent possible.” The phrase captures both the limits and the creative potential of change and innovation.”
As an example of the adjacent possible (and I love these little facts), Steven Johnson takes the Difference Engine. Charles Babbage invented this Difference Engine in the 19th century, and soon after, several innovations and products were created for mechanical calculation based on the concept of the Difference Engine. One example is William S. Burroughs.
“In 1884, an American inventor named William S. Burroughs founded the American
Arithmometer Company to sell mass-produced calculators to businesses around the country. (The fortune generated by those machines would help fund his namesake grandson’s writing career, not to mention his drug habit, almost a century later.) “
The stirring of the soup Not only is this concept of idea soup a societal phenomenon, but it also applies on the personal level. The more stirring in the brain soup, the better it is for connecting ideas in the brain. A brain scientist, Robert Thatcher, studied this in children and found.
“Thatcher then compared the brain-wave results with the children’s IQ scores, he found a direct correlation between the two data sets. Every extra millisecond spent in the chaotic mode added as much as twenty IQ points. Longer spells in phase-lock deducted IQ points, though not as dramatically. Thatcher’s study suggests a counterintuitive notion: the more disorganised your brain is, the smarter you are.”
Serendipity, some level of chaos, collisions, mistakes, and for us, readers, Johnson adds that reading is an ideal idea generator.
“While the creative walk can produce new serendipitous combinations of existing ideas in our heads, we can also cultivate serendipity in the way that we absorb new ideas from the outside world. Reading remains an unsurpassed vehicle for the transmission of interesting new ideas and perspectives.”
Exaptation Johnson further sees similarities in the biological concept of exaptation.
“… first proposed in an influential 1971 essay by Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba: exaptation. An organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function. The classic example, featured prominently in Gould and Vrba’s essay, is bird feathers, which we believe initially evolved for temperature regulation […] A feather adapted for warmth is now exapted for flight.”
Exaptation can be found in cultural developments, such as the evolution of the novel, but also in scientific and technological evolutions.
” In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler argued that “all decisive events in the history of scientific thought can be described in terms of mental cross-fertilization between different disciplines.” Concepts from one domain migrate to another as a kind of structuring metaphor, thereby unlocking some secret door that had long been hidden from view.”
Whether it is caused by stirring the soup or exaptation, the key lies in combining different cultures, lifestyles, professions, and passions. The layering and combinatorial movements of different perspectives feed innovation. These are the rainforests from Hwang. This is an explanation for the superlinear scaling of creativity in urban environments. This is not driven by economic incentives; it is driven by open networks. People will innovate regardless of the economic benefit, or even more strongly: economic benefits may get in the way where these will lead to the protection of innovations instead of sharing.
Johnson ends with some advice on how to build an idea-generating environment for yourself, your own little rainforest, or coral reef, Johnson’s metaphor for such an innovative environment.
“… you can create comparable environments on the scale of everyday life: in the workplaces you inhabit; in the way you consume media; in the way you augment your memory. The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank.”
James Gleick wrote Chaos. The book that inspired me to write my own fractals (the function of functions z -> z + c where z and c are complex numbers and c is a complex constant). I wrote it in Java and displayed it in an applet in the browser. Slow as hell but it worked. Chaos is a great read, up to the last word.
The experience is similar reading The Information. My notes.
From African drums to the OED
Gleick guides the reader through the development of information and communication systems over the past centuries.
The book sets off with the messaging system of tribes in Africa using drums. Gleick then continues to writing and how that forms and changes the process of thinking.
“The written word – the persistent word – was a prerequisite for conscious thought as we understand it.”
The next step in the development is logic and mathematics, the development of language and dictionaries and formalization of spelling.
Gleick tells the story of the development of the Oxford English Dictionary (the OED). The first creators of the OED used Milton and Shakespeare as the foundation for this English dictionary. Shakespeare stands out as a massive contributor to English. As an inventor or inventor or first recorder of thousands of words as we have seen, he is the most quoted author in the OED as well, with no less than over thirty thousand references.
As a sidenote (and not the last for this article), where Shakespeare in English is a central foundational reference for English Language, the Statenvertaling of the Bible holds a similar position for Dutch. You could write a PhD thesis on the cultural consequences of this fundamental differences, and similarities in these language foundations: one with a creative, theatrical, literary background, the other a formal, religious one.
Computation and logic
Gleick continues with the development of computation, from the creation of logarithmic tables to Charles Babbage, who we could view a the prophet of the modern computer. Babbage thought of programming language and memory, in the 19th century, way before these terms existed in such context. Gleick tells the story about Babbage’s working relation with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter. Where Babbage seemed the inventor of the computing machine before its existence, Ada was the programmer of this non-existent machine, hitting programming problems that could only 100 years later be exercised on real computers.
“How multifarious and how mutually complicated are the considerations which the working of such an engine involve. There are frequently several distinct sets of effects going on simultaneously; all in a manner independent of each other, and yet to a greater or lesser degree exercising a mutual influence.”
(As a sidestep: two recent books have been published on Lovelace and Babbage that I have not yet have time to read. The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua – a graphic novel I am really looking forward to. And Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine by Laurie Wallmark.)
Leaving Babbage, Gleick brings us to the development of the telegraph, a first electric apparatus speeding communication over distances. Communications were coded, and morse code becoming a standard at some point.
The limitations of logic
The need for secrecy was needed lead to the development of cryptography. Entree Claude Shannon who introduced the science of Information theory. Shannon worked on predictability and redundancy in streams of data representing encrypted texts. Claude Shannon invented how logical operations could process information and how to build these operations in systems with relays. Shannon wanted to build these systems to prove theorems.
At about the same time, Kurt Gödel came around and proved that the ideal mathematical world of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, where all mathematical theorems could be proved by logic, was false. Gödel proved that any logical system is inconsistent or incomplete. GEBHofstadter has explained this counter-intuitive conclusion in Gödel, Escher, Bach extensively and illustratively and Gleick makes no attempt to improve on that.
Turing at the same time proved a similar notion, the Entscheidungsproblem – by Hilbert – can every proposition be proven to be true or false – and Turings answer was no. He did this through the invention of a theoretical computer, the Turing Machine.
Interestingly, the main protagonist of the book, Claude Shannon, is a secluded mathematician working for Bell Labs. At the same time as Alan Turing, and incidently or not they both worked on cryptanalysis during the war without knowing this from eachother (classified, Turing from England, Shannon from the US), and they even have worked some time at Bell Labs and met up with lunch now and then. (The same Bell labs that is the subject of Douglas Coupland’s Kitten Clone, and the company that still today provides the backbone of our information highway, The Internet.)
The computer
All this work by eventually culminated in the creation of the information processing machine, nowadays knows as the computer.
Shannon continued to develop his Information Theory, looking at quantification of predictablility and redundancy to measure information content. He conducted some tests with his wife, using a Raymond Chandler’s detective Pickup on Noon Street,
“… put his finger on a short passage at random, and asked Betty to start guessing the letter, then the next letter, then the next. The more text she saw, of course, the better her chances of guessing right.”
Shannon and Schrödinger bring physics and information theory were together in the notion of entropy. Information processing, thinking and artificial intelligence notions develop.
DNA and information theory
Information theory is found to apply to nature itself: DNA is discovered. The development of thinking of biology in term of computability, algorithms, procedures gives more insight into the building blocks of life itself. (And as an aside, if we are able to think of the biological mechanisms in terms of algorithms, can we do so too for societal mechanisms to which a human belongs. And to the intellectual developments, meaning can we also build a recipe for the development of information to knowledge to intelligence? Which would be logical in the context of the characteristic of life to move towards negative entropy.)
Richard Dawkins develops his ideas about the Selfish Gene. Which has much in common with the Antifragility thinking of Taleb. Chaitin and Kolmogorov develop a theory to measure how much information is contained in a given ‘object’. Complexity is described in computability terms. And complexity has computability problems, like Gödel’s theory and this was the Chaitin version of incompleteness.
Lastly, Gleick brings us to quantum computing, making computations on an atomic scale.
Dealing with information abundance
The book closes with a view on the proliferation of information, describing the development of Wikipedia. The amount of information we have access to nowadays is becoming a challenge in itself. There’s information in abundance, but to find useful information in the overwhelming pile is the trick. Dissemination, filtering, ordering and search becoming essential tools. This is still something we do not have under control yet.
Gleick leaves the reader with a challenge to self. Learn to deal with the amount of information available. Then I mean not to manage the information, but to being psychologically able to handle information abundance. The FOMO and threat of total information procrastination is real. We will need to learn to ignore. We will also need to our own ways to store, record, share the information we find useful or interesting.
How to manage Borges’ library of Babel.
The book is an achievement on itself. Admirable how much information (no pun intended) Gleick has been able to pack in a book.
This website is an attempt to record, organise and share information that comes to me.
